Subscribe

New posts quarterly.

Email Address

Thank you!

Robert Bingaman is an artist, writer, filmmaker and content creator based in Kansas City, Missouri. His pursuits are far-ranging, with the most significant focus in engaging brand narratives, content strategy, and painting. In the last three years, he has provided consulting and art direction for a number of public brands.

Kansas City, Missouri, 2016

Our most vivid memories tend to elude capture. We try to share them with others, go Dutch on what was so meaningful to us—only to stammer in the recounting, repeating ourselves with different inflections and emphases, impotent in the face of the infinite. Enter Robert Bingaman’s Memorial, new paintings that explore image, obsession, and the place where our compulsion to share outpaces our ability to describe.

The shapes and color combinations that Bingaman could factor into more of these paintings seem endless, even as Until It's All You See captures an idea at its pinnacle. See these paintings and you may find yourself wanting a Bingaman pool on your wall more than you want the real thing dug into your yard.

For most Americans, swimming pools are not just a symbol of luxury, but an arena of shared experience. You might recall a summer visit to a bustling municipal pool, a quiet solo swim at a hotel after midnight, or a raucous high school party in the yard of a friend whose parents were out of town. “Those are the best nights,” Bingaman says, and the fact that your stories don’t overlap doesn’t matter — the pools are large enough to contain any number of memories of leisure, youth or weightlessness.

Overland Park, Kansas, 2014

Although their inspiration is personal, Bingaman’s pool paintings appeal to one and all. They invite us to summon our memories, project our longings and lose ourselves in their alluring polygons of blue.

The pools themselves, with their varied, subtle color shifts done in layers of paint and oil, seem infinitely deep. These pools don’t just float on the surface of the canvas: Uncannily, they seem to open into another space beyond and behind the painting. Seemingly lit from within and from below, the floating pools shimmer in the shadowy night, portals to the unknown.

Indeed, Bingaman is highly conscious of the spiritual meanings that many world religions attach to water, and he understands any large volume of this element – be it an ocean, a reflecting pool, or a swimming pool – as a locus of mystery and power. And ultimately it is the symbolic potential of Bingaman’s pictures, combined with their formal authority, which gives them their remarkable resonance. These visionary Night Pools transcend the quotidian reality of illumined backyard pools to evoke not only the elemental contest between light and darkness, but even more, the aching appeal of everything that attracts us but which we can never truly possess.